Middle-aged couch potatoes can undo heart damage
Experts say exercising five times a week should be like ‘brushing your teeth’ after study shows improvement
EXERCISING five times a week can reverse damage to ageing hearts and prevent cardiac failure for middle-aged couch potatoes, even after a lifetime of inactivity, a study suggests. Researchers at the University of Texas said the results were so “extraordinary” that the regime should be “prescribed for life” and become an habitual part of living, in the same way as brushing teeth.
More than 900,000 people in Britain suffer from heart failure, which occurs when the heart is too stiff to properly pump blood around the body, causing breathlessness, fatigue and wheezing.
A fifth of those diagnosed will die within a year, while the majority will be dead within a decade. But the research showed that middle-aged people can reverse damage to their hearts through exercise, even if they have never been active.
Participants who stuck to a regime for two years showed significant improvements in how their body used oxygen and more elastic heart muscle, both signs of a much healthier heart.
“The result was a reversal of decades of a sedentary lifestyle on the heart for most of the study participants,” said Dr Benjamin Levine, the director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine, a joint program between Texas Health Resources and UT Southwestern Medical Center Dallas, Texas.
The study found that exercise must begin before the age of 65, when the heart still has enough plasticity to repair itself.
The regime includes one hour a week of tennis, cycling, running, dancing or brisk walking, as well as two or three 30-minute sessions of moderate exercise, such as swimming and a session of strength training.
Dr Levine said: “I think people should be able to do this as part of their personal hygiene – just like brushing your teeth and taking a shower.”
The researchers monitored the hearts of 53 adults ages 45-64 who did no exercise at the start of the study and who spent large parts of their day sitting down. Sedentary behaviour is known to cause heart muscle to shrink and stiffen in middle age, and those taking part were at high risk of developing heart failure.
Of the participants, 27 were asked to take part in high and moderate intensity aerobic exercise for at least four days a week, as well as strength training, while the other group engaged in yoga and weight training three times a week but did no aerobic activity. The amount of exercise was increased over time, starting out with just three sessions a week and slowly increasing.
The programme not only made people fitter, increasing the amount of energy used during exercise by 18 per cent, but also improved heart muscle stiffness by 25 per cent. The research was published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation.